.This is the question that often engages and then paralyzes even the smartest leaders.
Often, their experiences and those they have observed in other organizations have not yielded the designed results; instead, they have created even more dysfunctional and paralyzed situations.
Adriaan Bekman is one of the world’s leading theorists and, above all, experimenters of horizontal leadership practices. By attending him and reading his writings, I have found some new and useful points of observation for my work as an organizational developer:
- leadership is a process with a high number of stakeholders;
- the customer experience is what everything must be based on;
- processes can only be improved if we leave the spaces to be filled by those involved.
“SEE THE CAMEL FIRST AND THEN PAY THE MONEY”
This was said yesterday by a manager to his supervisor who, during one of my consulting sessions, was telling him about the important changes that had been decided at the last board meeting. These were truly “momentous” changes, even expected, but the mood of that manager said a lot about what his contribution to the project would be.
Many of these leaders, forced by the circumstances, decide to go ahead anyway and when the change finds too much resistance, very often, they back it up with some very vertical “organizational hammering” which in the short term gives them the feeling that things have moved.
TOO BAD THAT THE ORGANIZATION THEN STARTS TO FRAY:
- the level of engagement drops;
- people who haven’t understood why, leave as soon as they can;
- new entrants fail to integrate as quickly as the project would require.
And new “organizational hammering” takes place. In short, a beautiful example of a vicious circle that always stops at a lower level of efficiency compared to the one from which it started.
BUT WHY?
It’s quickly said. In the control room, people work on very theoretical scenarios and always refer to generic best practices. New structures are decided upon, important slogans are written “on the walls”, but things go on as before, and instead of asking what went wrong in their creation, it’s the people who are considered inadequate to the change, not up to the task.
The reference culture is rather outdated and does not envisage that the head-collaborator relationship has substantially changed over time: the boss decides and the people execute, otherwise they are inadequate.
The managerial reference model can still be used, however in a very expensive way, in routine management (assuming that there are organizations that manage to have routine moments): it is in fact a matter of working on simple or, at most, complicated processes, where it is still possible to proceed with the logic that well-observed causes precede known effects. These are the kind of worlds where best practices and good practices are the way out.
It’s a pity that in recent years the great challenges involve non-linear logic, to be applied to complex situations, where the effects are known only after experimenting and where the causes are not so predictive.
The importance of the leader-collaborator relationship
Dealing with the complex can’t simply be handled by flipping through books or giving unconditional proxies to experts. What is needed is for all stakeholders to be involved in a deep and true collaboration.
In these situations, the relationship between leaders and collaborators becomes the only way to deal with the continuous change that organizations are experiencing. There is a need for a continuous evolutionary capacity where direction and guidance must be clearer and it must also be clearer how to collaborate.
Collaboration is about connecting in an emergent and critical way the inner worlds of the people impacted by change. It means taking on their thinking and feeling to generate the awareness and strength needed to develop the next steps.
In this sense, Horizontal Leadership can be a way of organizing that is more appropriate to the evolutionary level that people have reached. It’s only too bad that organizations so far have given it little consideration.
To change is to be able to look at a map while we walk together through the real territory, step by step.
